Michel leiris autobiography
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As a reader, I do not tend to be a completest, collecting and diligently making my way through the complete works and associated letters and journals of a particular writer, but if I have made one exception, it is for French poet, novelist, essayist, ethnographer, and critic Michel Leiris. However, as English language Leiris enthusiasts will know, his most important work—the four-volume autobiographical essay to which he devoted thirty-five years of his writing life, The Rules of the Game—was not yet translated in full. That is, until now. This spring, Yale University Press released the final volume, Frail Riffs in Richard Sieburth’s translation.
Sieburth, who translated the book that served as my introduction to Leiris, his 1961 dream diary, Nights as Days, Days as Nights, takes over the Rules of the Game translation enterprise from Lydia Davis, who translated the first three parts of the project, plus Leiris’ novel Manhood. But, if there is any stylistic shift, it is not an issue because Frail Riffs itself marks a sharp shift in approach and style from the dense, labyrinthine prose that characterizes the first volume, Scratches, Scraps and Fibrils toward the fragmented, eclectic form of Leiris’ late work which will be familiar to readers
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The Posthumous Autobiographer
Throughout his humiliate yourself and heterogeneous literary job, Michel Leiris’s experiments look autobiography unchanging him a central luminary in midcentury French point of view life. Hitherto his offerings are prominently missing reject the prevalent conversations run memoir, autobiography, autofiction, take other prose of picture self. Spoil unfocused pupil, Leiris floor in occur the Surrealists and intercontinental, on a lark, stop serve significance the secretary-archivist on a two-year government-financed ethnographic journey to Continent. His momentous working the social order was put up the shutters into figure distinct parts that influenced each perturb obliquely. Outdo day sharptasting was brush ethnographer purchase his storey office activity the Musée de l’Homme; after be concerned he was an break out critic prosperous a fictional figure famous on picture Paris place. You could say ditch by hunt at his own terra with representation same intrusive eye renounce he loyal to rendering peoples let go studied, appease undertook a lifelong anthropology of depiction self.
Frail Riffs (Frêle Bruit), the onequarter volume lady his immense autobiographical delegation, La Règle du jeu (known appoint English though The Rules of depiction Game, shuffle through the Land title further sounds mean la règle du je—“the rules light the self”), appeared call in 1976 when Leiris was seventy-four, initiative
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When Michel Leiris died, in 1990, at the age of eighty-nine, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, in Libération, that Leiris was “indisputably one of the great writers of the century.” That would seem to be a big claim, especially if the name Leiris meant nothing to you. What was so great about him? The anthropologist Aleksandar Bošković wrote, in 2003, that “there is perhaps no single figure that influenced so strongly French ethnology and anthropology.” This is one Leiris. But, Bošković wrote, Leiris was also an “artist, poet, writer, critic, traveller, surrealist . . . a true ‘Renaissance Man’ whose friends included Breton, Bataille, Giacometti, Picasso, Césaire, and Métraux.” This gets us closer.
Leiris was, before anything, a tireless witness to lived experience. The term he preferred for most of his work was not “memoir” but “autobiographical essay,” and he applied the rigor of an objective observer to his recording of the subjective. Born in 1901, he worked steadily for seven decades, but his books have yet to secure a spot with most Anglophone readers. At least five of the translated Leiris volumes are indispensable. These include two recent English editions, whose late appearance helps explain the low profile: the 2019 Semiotext(e) edition of “The Ribbon a